Computer Science · 9th Grade

Active learning ideas

Risks and Dependencies of Cloud Infrastructure

Active learning works for this topic because students need to see how cloud dependencies affect real systems and people. Mapping their own digital day, reverse-engineering an outage, or designing recovery plans makes abstract risks visible and consequential.

• Common Core State Standards
• CSTA: 3A-NI-04
• CSTA: 3A-CS-01

• 30–40 min
• Pairs → Whole Class
• 4 activities

Activity 01

• Case Study Analysis
• 30 min · Whole Class

Dependency Mapping: Your Digital Day

Students list every digital service they used in the past 24 hours. Using a provider lookup guide, they trace each service to its underlying cloud provider. The class aggregates results on a shared board, revealing how concentrated their collective digital lives actually are.

Critique the risks of relying on a small number of companies for cloud infrastructure.

Facilitation Tip

During Dependency Mapping: Your Digital Day, ask students to trace every app they used in the last 24 hours back to a cloud provider and document the steps aloud to surface hidden dependencies.

What to look for

Pose the question: 'Imagine your school's learning management system (like Canvas or Google Classroom) is hosted by one of the major cloud providers. What are two specific risks if that provider experiences a major, multi-day outage?' Facilitate a class discussion to explore student responses.

• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create
• Decision-Making
• Self-Management

Activity 02

• Case Study Analysis
• 35 min · Small Groups

Case Study Analysis: The AWS Outage

Groups analyze the December 2021 AWS us-east-1 outage: what failed, which services went down, and why. They map the organizational response and identify which companies had adequate redundancy versus those that were completely offline. Each group proposes what adequate redundancy would have required.

Predict the impact of a major cloud service outage on global operations.

Facilitation Tip

For the Case Study Analysis: The AWS Outage, have students annotate a timeline with colored bars showing which companies were affected and when, so they see how one technical failure propagates.

What to look for

Provide students with a short list of popular online services (e.g., streaming video, social media, online gaming). Ask them to research and identify which of the top three cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) likely hosts each service, then discuss the implications of this dependency.

• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create
• Decision-Making
• Self-Management

Activity 03

• Case Study Analysis
• 40 min · Small Groups

Design Challenge: Disaster Recovery Architecture

Groups receive a scenario: 'You are the CTO of a hospital. Your electronic health record system runs on a single AWS region.' They design a disaster recovery plan meeting a 4-hour recovery time objective, justify their architectural choices, and estimate the approximate cost increase.

Justify the need for redundancy and disaster recovery plans in cloud architecture.

Facilitation Tip

When running the Design Challenge: Disaster Recovery Architecture, provide a limited set of building blocks (regions, providers, backup tools) so students focus on trade-offs rather than tool selection.

What to look for

Ask students to write one sentence explaining why relying on a single cloud provider can be risky, and one sentence describing a strategy to mitigate that risk. Collect these to gauge understanding of dependency and resilience.

• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create
• Decision-Making
• Self-Management

Activity 04

• Socratic Seminar
• 35 min · Whole Class

Socratic Seminar: Should Governments Regulate Cloud Concentration?

Students read two short articles before class: one arguing for regulatory intervention on critical cloud dependencies, one arguing market forces will drive adequate redundancy. The student-led seminar explores what counts as critical infrastructure and who bears responsibility for outages.

Critique the risks of relying on a small number of companies for cloud infrastructure.

Facilitation Tip

In the Socratic Seminar: Should Governments Regulate Cloud Concentration?, seat students in concentric circles to rotate perspectives and ensure quieter voices are heard.

What to look for

Pose the question: 'Imagine your school's learning management system (like Canvas or Google Classroom) is hosted by one of the major cloud providers. What are two specific risks if that provider experiences a major, multi-day outage?' Facilitate a class discussion to explore student responses.

• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create
• Social Awareness
• Relationship Skills

A few notes on teaching this unit

Teach this topic through layered examples that move from personal to global scale. Start with students’ own devices and apps to build intuition, then use a documented failure to make risk concrete. Avoid letting discussions drift into vendor comparisons; keep the focus on dependency and resilience patterns. Research shows that when students articulate failure modes in their own words, they retain concepts longer than when they only hear technical definitions.

Successful learning looks like students explaining why cloud concentration matters, identifying single points of failure in familiar apps, and proposing feasible resilience strategies. They should connect technical language (regions, SLAs, outages) to lived experiences of downtime.

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Watch Out for These Misconceptions

• During Dependency Mapping: Your Digital Day, watch for students assuming every app they use is stored in the cloud.

  Use the mapping activity to explicitly ask students to distinguish local storage from cloud storage and to identify which services rely on cloud providers for delivery, even if the data is stored locally.

• During Design Challenge: Disaster Recovery Architecture, watch for students believing that adding a backup in the same cloud region is sufficient protection.

  Have students test their design by simulating a region-wide outage and observing whether their backup is also inaccessible, then revise their architecture to include geographic separation.

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Methods used in this brief

• Case Study Analysis
• Socratic Seminar